https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of gooks....
<DELETE PLAGIARIZED BULLSHIT>
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of Covid Truth-Tellers Go to Washington
Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just outside Atlanta,
started a website in 2020 to hold government agencies accountable for
their Covid data. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
During the pandemic, they were ostracized. Now, theyre influencing
public policy.
By Carrie McKean
05.14.25 Health and Self-Improvement
--:--
--:--
Upgrade to Listen
5 mins
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
200
211
Earlier this week, we ran a collection of pieces by the new leaders of >American public healthdoctors Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay >Prasadall of whom just happen to have contributed to The Free Press.
Five years ago, they raised serious questions in our pages about
lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandatesquestions for which
they were vilified. Now, all of them have been not only vindicated, but >promoted to some of the highest offices in public health. But these
leaders are only part of the story. Behind them is a ragtag group of
ordinary Americans who also asked questions during the Covid era, and
kept asking them, even though they were belittled, discredited, and >ostracized. In todays piece, reporter Carrie McKean profiles these >individuals, and asks them: How can we move forward? How can these new >leaders restore our faith in public health?
The Editors
Five years ago, Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just
outside Atlanta and runs a small photography business, was, like most of
us, filled with dread and confusion. It was the early days of Covid. At
the time, the Georgia Health Department wasnt keeping a public record
of the number of cases. So Kelley, whos in her forties, began plugging >numbers she saw on the news into her own spreadsheet and started a
website, Covid-Georgia.com, to share her data, gaining a wide following
on Twitter (now X) under the handle @KelleyKGa.
It didnt take long for Krohnert to start noticing statistical errors,
which grew only more common as time went on. The CDCs own unofficial
Covid Data Tracker of cases from across the nation often reported higher >pediatric death counts than the official numbers on the National Center
for Health Statistics website. And the media often reported those higher >numbers. As time went on, the CDC reported that 4 percent of Covid
deaths were children, when their own data showed it was .04 percent. In
2022, she discovered that a frightening study cited by the CDC during
its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the diseases
risk to children; for example, it compared 26 months of Covid-associated >deaths to one year of deaths from other causes.
These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldnt make, >Krohnert said of errors she found in CDC Covid data. (Angela Weiss/AFP
via Getty Images)
These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldnt make, >Krohnert told me. She didnt start out with any inherent suspicion of
the government. She expected officials to be a trusted source of
information and to deliver level-headed guidance. But the more she
burrowed into the Covid numbers, the more problems she saw. And
remarkably, all the errors she identified made things seem worse and
more dangerous than they were.
Krohnert did get some recognition and vindication. After she alerted the >authors of the study about their errors regarding Covids risks to
children, they immediately made corrections, and the CDC eventually
stopped claiming Covid was one of the top five killers of children. Yet >Krohnert said the agency never responded to her directly. It also >characterized her as just a person with a web page or a blog in an
email that became public following an FOIA request to the studys
authors. And it plowed ahead with approval of the childhood Covid
vaccine. After Krohnert replied to a post by Surgeon General Jerome
Adams that defended Covid vaccine trials, he posted a thread. You trust
your electrician / plumber / tax preparer. You should trust your doc,
Adams wrote.
As for the inflated case numbers? Eventually, the CDC quietly removed
72,277 misattributed deaths from the Covid Data Tracker, a data
correction attributed to Krohnerts advocacy by The BMJ (formerly the
British Medical Journal).
Looking back now through the fog of Covid, it is easy to overlook the
data nerds, virologists, epidemiologists, and ordinary citizens like
Krohnert who, scattered across the country, doggedly fact-checked the
U.S. government. For their efforts, they were censored and shadow-banned
on social media, scorned by polite society, and discredited as
dangerous, science-denying conspiracy theorists by high-level government >officials and the mainstream media. But they persisted, and 40 to 50 of
them eventually connected on Twitter, creating an informal group they
dubbed Rational Ground/Team Reality.
In 2022, Kelly Krohnert discovered that a study cited by the CDC during
its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the diseases
risk to children. (Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images)
And since then, times have changed. Today, Team Reality is seeing their >recommendations adopted by the federal government.
One of the medical experts who broke with the consensus during the
pandemic and joined forces with Rational Ground, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a >professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, is
now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Two weeks ago, in
one of his first official actions, Bhattacharya announced that the NIH
will accelerate the rollout of a plan to make available to the public
all data gathered from taxpayer-funded NIH scientific research studies.
Its a policy recommendation consistently put forth by members of
Rational Ground.
I believe very strongly that the products and data produced by
scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the >public, Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans
have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the
public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that
fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job.
It was a kind of pinch-me moment, said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data
and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few
weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment
of the fringe epidemiologist, as he was baselessly called by former
NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency.
Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and >Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a
one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking
conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views.
Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks
to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after
reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and >professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things
they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that >public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good
data and calling the Covid response a potential fiasco in the making.
From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great
Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two >colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable
to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society.
The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag >community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream.
We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people
who were very conservative Republicans, said Hart. Its amazing how >unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids
and impinging our freedoms.
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes
himself as a right-of-center, insatiably curious
artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives
outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The >Atlantics Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of >Covids impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a
right-of-center, insatiably curious artificial-intelligence engineer
with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his
data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a
full-time Covid hobby, he said. Shapiro joined other volunteersgood >people trying to do an important thingto input data, analyze trends,
and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health.
But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease >Control and Preventions recommendations, for example, that Covid spread
as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without
them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. All
my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just
like, Not touching that,? he recalled.
Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant >narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More >alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for >society. Thats not the story were telling ourselves about who we
are, he told me.
Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiros full-time hobby during the >pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group >worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the
first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC
assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid
task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal >lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all >Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued >grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found
them.
In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. Weve had >people rage-quit, said Hart. Like in any human endeavor, we definitely
have our moments where people dont see things in the same way, but we
had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss >things.
Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional
reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership
of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want >safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government >authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing
transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health.
To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be
robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis
of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even
in emergency situations.
Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth, NIH
director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty >Images)
Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence
demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of
imposition, said Krohnert. With Covid, we got the opposite:
low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with
massive impositions and untold costs.
They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during
Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven >science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be
publicly available. If you collect data with our taxpayer money, its
our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing
it if it achieves some end-policy goal, he said.
Bhattacharya agrees. Government scientists do not have a monopoly on
the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded >investigation, including by members of the public with access to the
same data as public-health officials, he told me.
Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but
Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things
wrong. On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed
and corrected government agencies, he told me. Rational Ground often
relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to >correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.
Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the
predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and
businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data
and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said >Krohnert. Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors
from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire,
because they can make up what they want and claim its from some study
the government doesnt want you to see,? she said.
Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. Its about what
gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with >enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart,
we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But >according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies
that might refute CDC recommendations.
Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For
example, Hart was dismayed to learn that the same people who sit on NIH
grant committees to decide where funding goes also make policy >recommendations.
Such conflicts are a problem. After watching the CDC make so many
errorsand always in the same directionKrohnert co-wrote a paper for
the open-access Social Science Research Network, with Dr. Vinay Prasad,
the new head of the Food and Drug Administrations Center for Biologics >Evaluation and Research, calling for a firewall between the government >entities that gather statistics and those setting policy as a shield
against real or perceived systematic bias.
Krohnert also thinks there need to be better conversations about the
nature and efficacy of CDC recommendations, which can be overly cautious
and reflect a low tolerance for risk, such as its recommendation not to
eat raw cookie dough. As a result, the general public often ignores the
CDCs advice.
Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors from
spreading misinformation, Krohnert said. If anything, it adds fuel to
the fire. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
Since their recommendations can take on the force of law, official >recommendations by the CDC ought to include room for dissentor at least
some wiggle room, depending on the circumstances, Krohnert said. For
example, a recommendation to wear masks to prevent the spread of disease >might come with a qualification that it might not be appropriate in
every situation, so that pediatric speech-therapy clinics and preschools >neednt worry about getting sued for failing to follow the agencys advice.
And though they do want sweeping reform, Team Reality dont want to burn
the house down completely. Krohnert said she doesnt want to render the
CDC useless. Just the opposite. She believes that Americans need
entities they can trust, though government power usually should be
limited to the ability to recommend and not compel.
Public-health enforcing isolation of very sick, very contagious people
is not particularly controversial, she said. But during Covid, we had >public-health enforcing quarantine of healthy individuals.
We just seemed to skip over all the ethics of that.
There is, understandably, some concern that, as the editors of The Free
Press wrote yesterday in an editorial about public health, this >administrations approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel
is called for. And yet, the people Trump has selected to lead the NIH,
CDC, and FDA are highly credentialed, well-respected, and extremely >competent, and they are advocating policies that are as careful as they
are radical. These arent Robespierre lieutenants being elevated to
judge, jury, and executioner when the revolution was won, said Hart.
These are the people who shouldve been running things in the first place.
On Sun, 18 May 2025 08:22:59 -0700, Michael EjercitoWhat do you allege is my breed?
<MEjercit@HotMail.com> wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of gooks....
<DELETE PLAGIARIZED BULLSHIT>
Your breed brought that shit here and spread it everywhere.
America is deporting all the slant-eyed turds once and for all.
https://postimg.cc/0r8NkFQy
Goodbye gooks!
Michael Ejercito wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of Covid Truth-Tellers Go to Washington
Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just outside Atlanta,
started a website in 2020 to hold government agencies accountable for
their Covid data. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
During the pandemic, they were ostracized. Now, they’re influencing
public policy.
By Carrie McKean
05.14.25 — Health and Self-Improvement
--:--
--:--
Upgrade to Listen
5 mins
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
200
211
Earlier this week, we ran a collection of pieces by the new leaders of
American public health—doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay >> Prasad—all of whom just happen to have contributed to The Free Press.
Five years ago, they raised serious questions in our pages about
lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandates—questions for which
they were vilified. Now, all of them have been not only vindicated, but
promoted to some of the highest offices in public health. But these
leaders are only part of the story. Behind them is a ragtag group of
ordinary Americans who also asked questions during the Covid era, and
kept asking them, even though they were belittled, discredited, and
ostracized. In today’s piece, reporter Carrie McKean profiles these
individuals, and asks them: How can we move forward? How can these new
leaders restore our faith in public health?
—The Editors
Five years ago, Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just
outside Atlanta and runs a small photography business, was, like most of
us, filled with dread and confusion. It was the early days of Covid. At
the time, the Georgia Health Department wasn’t keeping a public record
of the number of cases. So Kelley, who’s in her forties, began plugging
numbers she saw on the news into her own spreadsheet and started a
website, Covid-Georgia.com, to share her data, gaining a wide following
on Twitter (now X) under the handle @KelleyKGa.
It didn’t take long for Krohnert to start noticing statistical errors,
which grew only more common as time went on. The CDC’s own “unofficial”
Covid Data Tracker of cases from across the nation often reported higher
pediatric death counts than the official numbers on the National Center
for Health Statistics website. And the media often reported those higher
numbers. As time went on, the CDC reported that 4 percent of Covid
deaths were children, when their own data showed it was .04 percent. In
2022, she discovered that a frightening study cited by the CDC during
its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s
risk to children; for example, it compared 26 months of Covid-associated
deaths to one year of deaths from other causes.
“These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,”
Krohnert said of errors she found in CDC Covid data. (Angela Weiss/AFP
via Getty Images)
“These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,”
Krohnert told me. She didn’t start out with any inherent suspicion of
the government. She expected officials to be a trusted source of
information and to deliver level-headed guidance. But the more she
burrowed into the Covid numbers, the more problems she saw. And
remarkably, all the errors she identified made things seem worse and
more dangerous than they were.
Krohnert did get some recognition and vindication. After she alerted the
authors of the study about their errors regarding Covid’s risks to
children, they immediately made corrections, and the CDC eventually
stopped claiming Covid was one of the top five killers of children. Yet
Krohnert said the agency never responded to her directly. It also
characterized her as just “a person with a web page or a blog” in an
email that became public following an FOIA request to the study’s
authors. And it plowed ahead with approval of the childhood Covid
vaccine. After Krohnert replied to a post by Surgeon General Jerome
Adams that defended Covid vaccine trials, he posted a thread. “You trust >> your electrician / plumber / tax preparer. You should trust your doc,”
Adams wrote.
As for the inflated case numbers? Eventually, the CDC quietly removed
72,277 misattributed deaths from the Covid Data Tracker, a data
correction attributed to Krohnert’s advocacy by The BMJ (formerly the
British Medical Journal).
Looking back now through the fog of Covid, it is easy to overlook the
data nerds, virologists, epidemiologists, and ordinary citizens like
Krohnert who, scattered across the country, doggedly fact-checked the
U.S. government. For their efforts, they were censored and shadow-banned
on social media, scorned by polite society, and discredited as
dangerous, science-denying conspiracy theorists by high-level government
officials and the mainstream media. But they persisted, and 40 to 50 of
them eventually connected on Twitter, creating an informal group they
dubbed “Rational Ground/Team Reality.”
In 2022, Kelly Krohnert discovered that a study cited by the CDC during
its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s
risk to children. (Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images)
And since then, times have changed. Today, Team Reality is seeing their
recommendations adopted by the federal government.
One of the medical experts who broke with the consensus during the
pandemic and joined forces with Rational Ground, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a
professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, is
now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Two weeks ago, in
one of his first official actions, Bhattacharya announced that the NIH
will accelerate the rollout of a plan to make available to the public
all data gathered from taxpayer-funded NIH scientific research studies.
It’s a policy recommendation consistently put forth by members of
Rational Ground.
“I believe very strongly that the products and data produced by
scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the
public,” Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans
have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the
public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that
fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job.
“It was a kind of pinch-me moment,” said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data >> and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few
weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment
of the “fringe epidemiologist,” as he was baselessly called by former
NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency.
Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and
Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a
one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking
conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views.
Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks
to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after
reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and
professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things
they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that
public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good
data and calling the Covid response a potential “fiasco in the making.” >>
From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great
Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two
colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable
to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society.
The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag
community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream.
“We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people
who were very conservative Republicans,” said Hart. “It’s amazing how >> unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids
and impinging our freedoms.”
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes
himself as a right-of-center, “insatiably curious”
artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives
outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The
Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of
Covid’s impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a
right-of-center, “insatiably curious” artificial-intelligence engineer >> with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his
data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a
“full-time Covid hobby,” he said. Shapiro joined other volunteers—“good
people trying to do an important thing”—to input data, analyze trends, >> and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health.
But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s recommendations, for example, that Covid spread >> as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without
them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. “All
my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just
like, ‘Not touching that,’?” he recalled.
Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant
narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More
alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for
society. “That’s not the story we’re telling ourselves about who we
are,” he told me.
Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiro’s “full-time hobby” during the >> pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group
worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the
first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC
assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid
task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal
lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all
Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued
grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found
them.
In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. “We’ve had >> people rage-quit,” said Hart. “Like in any human endeavor, we definitely >> have our moments where people don’t see things in the same way, but we
had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss
things.”
Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional
reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership
of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want
safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government
authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing
transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health.
To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be
robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis
of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even
in emergency situations.
“Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth,” NIH
director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty
Images)
“Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence
demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of
imposition,” said Krohnert. “With Covid, we got the opposite:
low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with
massive impositions and untold costs.”
They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during
Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven
science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be
publicly available. “If you collect data with our taxpayer money, it’s >> our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing
it if it achieves some end-policy goal,” he said.
Bhattacharya agrees. “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on
the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded
investigation, including by members of the public with access to the
same data as public-health officials,” he told me.
Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but
Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things
wrong. “On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed
and corrected government agencies,” he told me. “Rational Ground often >> relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to
correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.”
Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the
predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and
businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data
and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said
Krohnert. “Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors >>from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire,
because they can make up what they want and claim it’s from some study
the government ‘doesn’t want you to see,’?” she said.
Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. It’s about what
gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with
enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart,
we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But
according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies
that might refute CDC recommendations.
Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For
example, Hart was dismayed to learn that the same people who sit on NIH
grant committees to decide where funding goes also make policy
recommendations.
Such conflicts are a problem. After watching the CDC make so many
errors—and always in the same direction—Krohnert co-wrote a paper for
the open-access Social Science Research Network, with Dr. Vinay Prasad,
the new head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics
Evaluation and Research, calling for a firewall between the government
entities that gather statistics and those setting policy as a shield
against “real or perceived systematic bias.”
Krohnert also thinks there need to be better conversations about the
nature and efficacy of CDC recommendations, which can be overly cautious
and reflect a low tolerance for risk, such as its recommendation not to
eat raw cookie dough. As a result, the general public often ignores the
CDC’s advice.
“Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors from
spreading misinformation,” Krohnert said. “If anything, it adds fuel to >> the fire.” (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
Since their recommendations can take on the force of law, official
recommendations by the CDC ought to include room for dissent—or at least >> some wiggle room, depending on the circumstances, Krohnert said. For
example, a recommendation to wear masks to prevent the spread of disease
might come with a qualification that it might not be appropriate in
every situation, so that pediatric speech-therapy clinics and preschools
needn’t worry about getting sued for failing to follow the agency’s advice.
And though they do want sweeping reform, Team Reality don’t want to burn >> the house down completely. Krohnert said she doesn’t want to render the
CDC useless. Just the opposite. She believes that Americans need
entities they can trust, though government power usually should be
limited to the ability to recommend and not compel.
“Public-health enforcing isolation of very sick, very contagious people
is not particularly controversial,” she said. “But during Covid, we had >> public-health enforcing quarantine of healthy individuals.
“We just seemed to skip over all the ethics of that.”
There is, understandably, some concern that, as the editors of The Free
Press wrote yesterday in an editorial about public health, “this
administration’s approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel
is called for.” And yet, the people Trump has selected to lead the NIH,
CDC, and FDA are highly credentialed, well-respected, and extremely
competent, and they are advocating policies that are as careful as they
are radical. “These aren’t Robespierre lieutenants being elevated to
judge, jury, and executioner when the revolution was won,” said Hart.
“These are the people who should’ve been running things in the first place.”
In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
Michael Ejercito wrote:
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Michael Ejercito wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of Covid Truth-Tellers Go to Washington
Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just outside Atlanta,
started a website in 2020 to hold government agencies accountable for
their Covid data. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
During the pandemic, they were ostracized. Now, they’re influencing
public policy.
By Carrie McKean
05.14.25 — Health and Self-Improvement
--:--
--:--
Upgrade to Listen
5 mins
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
200
211
Earlier this week, we ran a collection of pieces by the new leaders of >>>> American public health—doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay >>>> Prasad—all of whom just happen to have contributed to The Free Press. >>>> Five years ago, they raised serious questions in our pages about
lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandates—questions for which >>>> they were vilified. Now, all of them have been not only vindicated, but >>>> promoted to some of the highest offices in public health. But these
leaders are only part of the story. Behind them is a ragtag group of
ordinary Americans who also asked questions during the Covid era, and
kept asking them, even though they were belittled, discredited, and
ostracized. In today’s piece, reporter Carrie McKean profiles these
individuals, and asks them: How can we move forward? How can these new >>>> leaders restore our faith in public health?
—The Editors
Five years ago, Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just
outside Atlanta and runs a small photography business, was, like most of >>>> us, filled with dread and confusion. It was the early days of Covid. At >>>> the time, the Georgia Health Department wasn’t keeping a public record >>>> of the number of cases. So Kelley, who’s in her forties, began plugging >>>> numbers she saw on the news into her own spreadsheet and started a
website, Covid-Georgia.com, to share her data, gaining a wide following >>>> on Twitter (now X) under the handle @KelleyKGa.
It didn’t take long for Krohnert to start noticing statistical errors, >>>> which grew only more common as time went on. The CDC’s own “unofficial”
Covid Data Tracker of cases from across the nation often reported higher >>>> pediatric death counts than the official numbers on the National Center >>>> for Health Statistics website. And the media often reported those higher >>>> numbers. As time went on, the CDC reported that 4 percent of Covid
deaths were children, when their own data showed it was .04 percent. In >>>> 2022, she discovered that a frightening study cited by the CDC during
its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s >>>> risk to children; for example, it compared 26 months of Covid-associated >>>> deaths to one year of deaths from other causes.
“These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,”
Krohnert said of errors she found in CDC Covid data. (Angela Weiss/AFP >>>> via Getty Images)
“These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,”
Krohnert told me. She didn’t start out with any inherent suspicion of >>>> the government. She expected officials to be a trusted source of
information and to deliver level-headed guidance. But the more she
burrowed into the Covid numbers, the more problems she saw. And
remarkably, all the errors she identified made things seem worse and
more dangerous than they were.
Krohnert did get some recognition and vindication. After she alerted the >>>> authors of the study about their errors regarding Covid’s risks to
children, they immediately made corrections, and the CDC eventually
stopped claiming Covid was one of the top five killers of children. Yet >>>> Krohnert said the agency never responded to her directly. It also
characterized her as just “a person with a web page or a blog” in an >>>> email that became public following an FOIA request to the study’s
authors. And it plowed ahead with approval of the childhood Covid
vaccine. After Krohnert replied to a post by Surgeon General Jerome
Adams that defended Covid vaccine trials, he posted a thread. “You trust >>>> your electrician / plumber / tax preparer. You should trust your doc,” >>>> Adams wrote.
As for the inflated case numbers? Eventually, the CDC quietly removed
72,277 misattributed deaths from the Covid Data Tracker, a data
correction attributed to Krohnert’s advocacy by The BMJ (formerly the >>>> British Medical Journal).
Looking back now through the fog of Covid, it is easy to overlook the
data nerds, virologists, epidemiologists, and ordinary citizens like
Krohnert who, scattered across the country, doggedly fact-checked the
U.S. government. For their efforts, they were censored and shadow-banned >>>> on social media, scorned by polite society, and discredited as
dangerous, science-denying conspiracy theorists by high-level government >>>> officials and the mainstream media. But they persisted, and 40 to 50 of >>>> them eventually connected on Twitter, creating an informal group they
dubbed “Rational Ground/Team Reality.”
In 2022, Kelly Krohnert discovered that a study cited by the CDC during >>>> its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s >>>> risk to children. (Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images)
And since then, times have changed. Today, Team Reality is seeing their >>>> recommendations adopted by the federal government.
One of the medical experts who broke with the consensus during the
pandemic and joined forces with Rational Ground, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a >>>> professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, is >>>> now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Two weeks ago, in >>>> one of his first official actions, Bhattacharya announced that the NIH >>>> will accelerate the rollout of a plan to make available to the public
all data gathered from taxpayer-funded NIH scientific research studies. >>>> It’s a policy recommendation consistently put forth by members of
Rational Ground.
“I believe very strongly that the products and data produced by
scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the
public,” Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans >>>> have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the
public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that
fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job. >>>>
“It was a kind of pinch-me moment,” said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data
and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few
weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment >>>> of the “fringe epidemiologist,” as he was baselessly called by former >>>> NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency.
Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and
Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a
one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking
conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views. >>>>
Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks >>>> to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after
reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and
professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things
they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that
public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good >>>> data and calling the Covid response a potential “fiasco in the making.”
From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great
Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two
colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable >>>> to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society. >>>> The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag >>>> community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream.
“We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people >>>> who were very conservative Republicans,” said Hart. “It’s amazing how
unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids
and impinging our freedoms.”
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes
himself as a right-of-center, “insatiably curious”
artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press) >>>> Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives
outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The >>>> Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of >>>> Covid’s impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a
right-of-center, “insatiably curious” artificial-intelligence engineer >>>> with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his
data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a
“full-time Covid hobby,” he said. Shapiro joined other volunteers—“good
people trying to do an important thing”—to input data, analyze trends, >>>> and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health.
But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease >>>> Control and Prevention’s recommendations, for example, that Covid spread >>>> as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without
them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. “All >>>> my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just >>>> like, ‘Not touching that,’?” he recalled.
Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant >>>> narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More
alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for
society. “That’s not the story we’re telling ourselves about who we >>>> are,” he told me.
Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiro’s “full-time hobby” during the
pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group >>>> worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the >>>> first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC
assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid >>>> task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal
lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all >>>> Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued
grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found >>>> them.
In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. “We’ve had
people rage-quit,” said Hart. “Like in any human endeavor, we definitely
have our moments where people don’t see things in the same way, but we >>>> had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss
things.”
Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional
reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership >>>> of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want >>>> safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government >>>> authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing
transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health.
To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be
robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis >>>> of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even >>>> in emergency situations.
“Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth,” NIH
director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty >>>> Images)
“Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence
demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of
imposition,” said Krohnert. “With Covid, we got the opposite:
low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with
massive impositions and untold costs.”
They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during
Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven >>>> science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be
publicly available. “If you collect data with our taxpayer money, it’s >>>> our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing >>>> it if it achieves some end-policy goal,” he said.
Bhattacharya agrees. “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on >>>> the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded >>>> investigation, including by members of the public with access to the
same data as public-health officials,” he told me.
Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but
Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things
wrong. “On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed >>>> and corrected government agencies,” he told me. “Rational Ground often >>>> relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to >>>> correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.”
Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the
predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and
businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data >>>> and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said
Krohnert. “Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors >>> >from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire,
because they can make up what they want and claim it’s from some study >>>> the government ‘doesn’t want you to see,’?” she said.
Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. It’s about what >>>> gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with >>>> enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart, >>>> we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But >>>> according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies >>>> that might refute CDC recommendations.
Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For
example, Hart was dismayed to learn that the same people who sit on NIH >>>> grant committees to decide where funding goes also make policy
recommendations.
Such conflicts are a problem. After watching the CDC make so many
errors—and always in the same direction—Krohnert co-wrote a paper for >>>> the open-access Social Science Research Network, with Dr. Vinay Prasad, >>>> the new head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics >>>> Evaluation and Research, calling for a firewall between the government >>>> entities that gather statistics and those setting policy as a shield
against “real or perceived systematic bias.”
Krohnert also thinks there need to be better conversations about the
nature and efficacy of CDC recommendations, which can be overly cautious >>>> and reflect a low tolerance for risk, such as its recommendation not to >>>> eat raw cookie dough. As a result, the general public often ignores the >>>> CDC’s advice.
“Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors from
spreading misinformation,” Krohnert said. “If anything, it adds fuel to
the fire.” (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
Since their recommendations can take on the force of law, official
recommendations by the CDC ought to include room for dissent—or at least >>>> some wiggle room, depending on the circumstances, Krohnert said. For
example, a recommendation to wear masks to prevent the spread of disease >>>> might come with a qualification that it might not be appropriate in
every situation, so that pediatric speech-therapy clinics and preschools >>>> needn’t worry about getting sued for failing to follow the agency’s advice.
And though they do want sweeping reform, Team Reality don’t want to burn >>>> the house down completely. Krohnert said she doesn’t want to render the >>>> CDC useless. Just the opposite. She believes that Americans need
entities they can trust, though government power usually should be
limited to the ability to recommend and not compel.
“Public-health enforcing isolation of very sick, very contagious people >>>> is not particularly controversial,” she said. “But during Covid, we had
public-health enforcing quarantine of healthy individuals.
“We just seemed to skip over all the ethics of that.”
There is, understandably, some concern that, as the editors of The Free >>>> Press wrote yesterday in an editorial about public health, “this
administration’s approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel >>>> is called for.” And yet, the people Trump has selected to lead the NIH, >>>> CDC, and FDA are highly credentialed, well-respected, and extremely
competent, and they are advocating policies that are as careful as they >>>> are radical. “These aren’t Robespierre lieutenants being elevated to >>>> judge, jury, and executioner when the revolution was won,” said Hart. >>>> “These are the people who should’ve been running things in the first place.”
In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ >>> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
I am wonderfully hungry!
While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with
all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Laus DEO !
ReplyPermalinkOn Mon, 19 May 2025 07:34:34 -0700, NOT Michael EjercitoYou assume people carry COVID and are subhuman merely because of
You sure have hostility against people who are slant of eye.You sure love your fellow COVID-carrying slant eyed subhumans.
They ALL outearn you, outwit you, outsex you, and outclass you!Is it because they all outearn you, outwit you, outsex you, andIs it because they can only outshit and outfart Humans?
outclass you?
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Michael Ejercito wrote:
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Michael Ejercito wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/
A Ragtag Group of Covid Truth-Tellers Go to Washington
Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just outside Atlanta,
started a website in 2020 to hold government agencies accountable for >>>>> their Covid data. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
During the pandemic, they were ostracized. Now, theyre influencing
public policy.
By Carrie McKean
05.14.25 Health and Self-Improvement
--:--
--:--
Upgrade to Listen
5 mins
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
200
211
Earlier this week, we ran a collection of pieces by the new leaders of >>>>> American public healthdoctors Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay >>>>> Prasadall of whom just happen to have contributed to The Free Press. >>>>> Five years ago, they raised serious questions in our pages about
lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandatesquestions for which >>>>> they were vilified. Now, all of them have been not only vindicated, but >>>>> promoted to some of the highest offices in public health. But these
leaders are only part of the story. Behind them is a ragtag group of >>>>> ordinary Americans who also asked questions during the Covid era, and >>>>> kept asking them, even though they were belittled, discredited, and
ostracized. In todays piece, reporter Carrie McKean profiles these
individuals, and asks them: How can we move forward? How can these new >>>>> leaders restore our faith in public health?
The Editors
Five years ago, Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just
outside Atlanta and runs a small photography business, was, like most of >>>>> us, filled with dread and confusion. It was the early days of Covid. At >>>>> the time, the Georgia Health Department wasnt keeping a public record >>>>> of the number of cases. So Kelley, whos in her forties, began plugging >>>>> numbers she saw on the news into her own spreadsheet and started a
website, Covid-Georgia.com, to share her data, gaining a wide following >>>>> on Twitter (now X) under the handle @KelleyKGa.
It didnt take long for Krohnert to start noticing statistical errors, >>>>> which grew only more common as time went on. The CDCs own unofficial >>>>> Covid Data Tracker of cases from across the nation often reported higher >>>>> pediatric death counts than the official numbers on the National Center >>>>> for Health Statistics website. And the media often reported those higher >>>>> numbers. As time went on, the CDC reported that 4 percent of Covid
deaths were children, when their own data showed it was .04 percent. In >>>>> 2022, she discovered that a frightening study cited by the CDC during >>>>> its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the diseases >>>>> risk to children; for example, it compared 26 months of Covid-associated >>>>> deaths to one year of deaths from other causes.
These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldnt make, >>>>> Krohnert said of errors she found in CDC Covid data. (Angela Weiss/AFP >>>>> via Getty Images)
These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldnt make, >>>>> Krohnert told me. She didnt start out with any inherent suspicion of >>>>> the government. She expected officials to be a trusted source of
information and to deliver level-headed guidance. But the more she
burrowed into the Covid numbers, the more problems she saw. And
remarkably, all the errors she identified made things seem worse and >>>>> more dangerous than they were.
Krohnert did get some recognition and vindication. After she alerted the >>>>> authors of the study about their errors regarding Covids risks to
children, they immediately made corrections, and the CDC eventually
stopped claiming Covid was one of the top five killers of children. Yet >>>>> Krohnert said the agency never responded to her directly. It also
characterized her as just a person with a web page or a blog in an >>>>> email that became public following an FOIA request to the studys
authors. And it plowed ahead with approval of the childhood Covid
vaccine. After Krohnert replied to a post by Surgeon General Jerome
Adams that defended Covid vaccine trials, he posted a thread. You trust >>>>> your electrician / plumber / tax preparer. You should trust your doc, >>>>> Adams wrote.
As for the inflated case numbers? Eventually, the CDC quietly removed >>>>> 72,277 misattributed deaths from the Covid Data Tracker, a data
correction attributed to Krohnerts advocacy by The BMJ (formerly the >>>>> British Medical Journal).
Looking back now through the fog of Covid, it is easy to overlook the >>>>> data nerds, virologists, epidemiologists, and ordinary citizens like >>>>> Krohnert who, scattered across the country, doggedly fact-checked the >>>>> U.S. government. For their efforts, they were censored and shadow-banned >>>>> on social media, scorned by polite society, and discredited as
dangerous, science-denying conspiracy theorists by high-level government >>>>> officials and the mainstream media. But they persisted, and 40 to 50 of >>>>> them eventually connected on Twitter, creating an informal group they >>>>> dubbed Rational Ground/Team Reality.
In 2022, Kelly Krohnert discovered that a study cited by the CDC during >>>>> its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the diseases >>>>> risk to children. (Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images)
And since then, times have changed. Today, Team Reality is seeing their >>>>> recommendations adopted by the federal government.
One of the medical experts who broke with the consensus during the
pandemic and joined forces with Rational Ground, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a >>>>> professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, is >>>>> now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Two weeks ago, in >>>>> one of his first official actions, Bhattacharya announced that the NIH >>>>> will accelerate the rollout of a plan to make available to the public >>>>> all data gathered from taxpayer-funded NIH scientific research studies. >>>>> Its a policy recommendation consistently put forth by members of
Rational Ground.
I believe very strongly that the products and data produced by
scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the >>>>> public, Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans >>>>> have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the
public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that
fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job. >>>>>
It was a kind of pinch-me moment, said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data >>>>> and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few >>>>> weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment >>>>> of the fringe epidemiologist, as he was baselessly called by former >>>>> NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency.
Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and >>>>> Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a
one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking
conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views. >>>>>
Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks >>>>> to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after
reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and >>>>> professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things >>>>> they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that >>>>> public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good >>>>> data and calling the Covid response a potential fiasco in the making. >>>>>
From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great >>>>> Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two
colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable >>>>> to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society. >>>>> The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag >>>>> community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream.
We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people >>>>> who were very conservative Republicans, said Hart. Its amazing how >>>>> unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids >>>>> and impinging our freedoms.
Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes
himself as a right-of-center, insatiably curious
artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press) >>>>> Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives
outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The >>>>> Atlantics Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of >>>>> Covids impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a
right-of-center, insatiably curious artificial-intelligence engineer >>>>> with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his
data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a
full-time Covid hobby, he said. Shapiro joined other volunteersgood >>>>> people trying to do an important thingto input data, analyze trends, >>>>> and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health.
But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease >>>>> Control and Preventions recommendations, for example, that Covid spread >>>>> as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without
them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. All >>>>> my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just >>>>> like, Not touching that,? he recalled.
Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant >>>>> narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More >>>>> alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for >>>>> society. Thats not the story were telling ourselves about who we
are, he told me.
Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiros full-time hobby during the >>>>> pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group >>>>> worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the >>>>> first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC
assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid >>>>> task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal >>>>> lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all >>>>> Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued
grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found >>>>> them.
In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. Weve had >>>>> people rage-quit, said Hart. Like in any human endeavor, we definitely >>>>> have our moments where people dont see things in the same way, but we >>>>> had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss >>>>> things.
Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional >>>>> reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership >>>>> of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want >>>>> safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government >>>>> authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing
transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health.
To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be
robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis >>>>> of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even >>>>> in emergency situations.
Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth, NIH
director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty >>>>> Images)
Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence
demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of
imposition, said Krohnert. With Covid, we got the opposite:
low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with
massive impositions and untold costs.
They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during >>>>> Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven >>>>> science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be >>>>> publicly available. If you collect data with our taxpayer money, its >>>>> our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing >>>>> it if it achieves some end-policy goal, he said.
Bhattacharya agrees. Government scientists do not have a monopoly on >>>>> the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded >>>>> investigation, including by members of the public with access to the >>>>> same data as public-health officials, he told me.
Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but
Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things
wrong. On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed >>>>> and corrected government agencies, he told me. Rational Ground often >>>>> relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to >>>>> correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.
Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the
predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and
businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)
Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data >>>>> and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said >>>>> Krohnert. Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors >>>> >from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire, >>>>> because they can make up what they want and claim its from some study >>>>> the government doesnt want you to see,? she said.
Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. Its about what >>>>> gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with >>>>> enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart, >>>>> we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But >>>>> according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies >>>>> that might refute CDC recommendations.
Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For >>>>> example, Hart was dismayed to learn that the same people who sit on NIH >>>>> grant committees to decide where funding goes also make policy
recommendations.
Such conflicts are a problem. After watching the CDC make so many
errorsand always in the same directionKrohnert co-wrote a paper for >>>>> the open-access Social Science Research Network, with Dr. Vinay Prasad, >>>>> the new head of the Food and Drug Administrations Center for Biologics >>>>> Evaluation and Research, calling for a firewall between the government >>>>> entities that gather statistics and those setting policy as a shield >>>>> against real or perceived systematic bias.
Krohnert also thinks there need to be better conversations about the >>>>> nature and efficacy of CDC recommendations, which can be overly cautious >>>>> and reflect a low tolerance for risk, such as its recommendation not to >>>>> eat raw cookie dough. As a result, the general public often ignores the >>>>> CDCs advice.
Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors from
spreading misinformation, Krohnert said. If anything, it adds fuel to >>>>> the fire. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press)
Since their recommendations can take on the force of law, official
recommendations by the CDC ought to include room for dissentor at least >>>>> some wiggle room, depending on the circumstances, Krohnert said. For >>>>> example, a recommendation to wear masks to prevent the spread of disease >>>>> might come with a qualification that it might not be appropriate in
every situation, so that pediatric speech-therapy clinics and preschools >>>>> neednt worry about getting sued for failing to follow the agencys advice.
And though they do want sweeping reform, Team Reality dont want to burn >>>>> the house down completely. Krohnert said she doesnt want to render the >>>>> CDC useless. Just the opposite. She believes that Americans need
entities they can trust, though government power usually should be
limited to the ability to recommend and not compel.
Public-health enforcing isolation of very sick, very contagious people >>>>> is not particularly controversial, she said. But during Covid, we had >>>>> public-health enforcing quarantine of healthy individuals.
We just seemed to skip over all the ethics of that.
There is, understandably, some concern that, as the editors of The Free >>>>> Press wrote yesterday in an editorial about public health, this
administrations approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel >>>>> is called for. And yet, the people Trump has selected to lead the NIH, >>>>> CDC, and FDA are highly credentialed, well-respected, and extremely
competent, and they are advocating policies that are as careful as they >>>>> are radical. These arent Robespierre lieutenants being elevated to >>>>> judge, jury, and executioner when the revolution was won, said Hart. >>>>> These are the people who shouldve been running things in the first place.
In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's >>>> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps >>>> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given >>>> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
I am wonderfully hungry!
While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with
all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Laus DEO !
Thank you for noting that I have no COVID.
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Subject: The LORD says "Blessed are you who hunger now ..."
Shame on andrew, look at his red face.
He is trying to pull a fast one. His scripture bit is found among these:
'14 Bible verses about Spiritual Hunger'
Psalms
81:10 I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt: >open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.
Proverbs
13:25 The righteous has enough to satisfy his appetite, But the stomach of >the wicked is in need.
Joel
2:26 And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of
the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my
people shall never be ashamed.
Psalms
107 For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.
Acts
14:17 "Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by >giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying
your hearts with food and gladness."
someone eternally condemned & ever more cursed by GOD perseverated:
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Subject: a very very very simple definition of sin ...
Does andrew's "definition" agree with scripture? Let's see in 1 John:
John wrote this to christians. The greek grammer (sic) speaks of an ongoing >> status. He includes himself in that status.
1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is
not in us.
1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, >> and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1:10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is >> not in us.
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